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2 October 2000

Read Daley's Han Solo trilogy and then Crispin's - thought Crispin's were better, though Daley's worth reading. Liked how Crispin acknowledged the Daley books in her third book, which overlapped them chronologically. Also read the novelizations of Episodes IV-VI - only OK.

Spent most of the past week reading Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders series - excellent, maybe even better than her Farseer trilogy, which is saying something. The third one was so gripping that I did little today other than reading it all the way through.

Books read: 12

5 October 2000

Back to Nancy Mitford - read Pigeon Pie (amusing but not up to the later novels) and her translation of The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette (good, but can't quite figure out why it was NM's favorite book - perhaps it loses in translation?). Now reading NM's biographies - elegantly written, well characterized, and not bogged down in too many boring details. Read Madame de Pompadour and Voltaire in Love; now rereading Frederick the Great.

Books read: 4

8 October 2000

Finished Frederick the Great; read The Sun King, which was lovely, but far from a full account of the life of Louis XIV - guess I'll have to get another bio of him sometime.

Books read: 2

15 October 2000

Still alternating Star Wars and Mitfordiana.

SW: read the Jedi Academy trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson (okay), I, Jedi by Michael Stackpole (very good), the Black Fleet trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell (ew - got Leia's character totally wrong; G. disliked them too, so out they go), The New Rebellion by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (okay), the Corellian trilogy by Roger MacBride Allen (pretty good), and the Hand of Thrawn duology by Timothy Zahn (very good).

Mitfords: read a bio of Nancy by Selina Hastings, which was interesting but could have gone into more depth; also a memoir of Nancy by Harold Acton, which had more details on her later years but was curiously reticent on some subjects, like her relationship with Gaston Palewski, whose name is carefully never mentioned. Now rereading Jessica Mitford's excellent memoir, Daughters and Rebels.

Books read: 15

18 October 2000

Finished Daughters and Rebels, and then tried to read Unity Mitford: A Quest, by David Pryce-Jones, about the Mitford sister who was a Nazi and friend of Hitler's and eventually ended up shooting herself in the head (not fatally) when England declared war on Germany. Now, I realize that she was not the most sympathetic character in the world, but this bio was just totally hostile toward all of the Mitfords, plus it was completely pretentious - author constantly referring to Mr. Famous Artist or Lord So-and-So as "a dear longtime friend of my family's", totally unnecessarily. I couldn't even finish it and threw it in the to-be-sold box.

Now finishing my Star Wars readthrough by reading the current New Jedi Order series : Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore (good) and the Dark Tide duology by Michael Stackpole (very good), and now reading the Agents of Chaos duology by James Luceno.

Books read: 4 (can't really count the Unity Mitford bio)

22 October 2000

Finished the Luceno Star Wars books (okay) and started reading Arthuriana. Have read the Mabinogion and The White Goddess by Robert Graves (which has some discussion of Taliesin and Merlin, though some of it seems a little off-the-wall and romantic), and A String in the Harp, a wonderful children's book by Nancy Bond about a family who discovers a harp key once owned by Taliesin, and then Tolkien's translation of "Sir Gawain and Green Knight".

Read the first seven Myth novels by Robert Asprin - there are ten of them, but I've read them before and got bored after seven. They were great reading ten years ago, but they just don't wear well (like Piers Anthony).

Read Birnbaum's 2001 Disney park guides for Disneyland, WDW, and WDW without kids (since we're going to WDW in December) and a book I just got at Disneyland called Disneyland - Celebrating 45 Years of Magic - not too much new (to me) in the text, but some nice pictures.

Books read: 17

25 October 2000

Still on Arthuriana: read Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence (so wonderful), Garner's spooky The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, and Rosemary Sutcliff's Tristan and Iseult, a beautifully told version for children - wish I knew of a good one for adults.

Books read: 8

29 October 2000

Read Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes, and more Rosemary Sutcliff - The Lantern Bearers and Sword at Sunset - up there with Mary Stewart as far as excellent historical retellings, this one focusing on Arthur rather than Merlin (as Stewart does). Also read Lancelot, by Walker Percy, but didn't like it - too violent and not really enough Arthurian themes to interest me.

On the non-Arthurian front, read The Flowering Thorn, by Margery Sharp (who wrote The Rescuers, though this was an adult novel) - a lovely and charming British novel from the 1930's, just the sort of book I love.

Books read: 5

Total books read this month: 67
Total books read this year (starting in mid-September): 86

Last updated 29 November 2005. All text and photographs © George Mitchell and Margaret Johnston, unless otherwise noted Comments, questions, suggestions to margaret@lonelymountain.net.